“Ours is a society of denial that conditions us to protect ourselves from any direct difficulty and discomfort. We expend enormous energy denying our insecurity, fighting pain, death and loss and hiding from the basic truths of the natural world and of our own nature.”
Jack Kornfield
What problems does therapy help with?
There can be many different reasons that motivate us to go in to therapy. But the common felt human experience we share that sits underneath those reasons is that of suffering in some way. Life can be really tough for each and every one of us. Finding resilience whilst living in today’s world can feel easier said than done. We can’t just be confident or resilient at the click of our fingers.
How resilient we feel today to meet life’s challenges is significantly related to how the brain and nervous system were shaped during childhood. We are all shaped by our earlier experiences, but in particular, we develop the capacity for emotional regulation through the relationships and interactions we have with the significant others in our lives.
We are born wired to connect, and with a brain and nervous system that seeks and requires the caring attuned response from our caregivers and those around us. However, when these relational needs are not met during infancy and childhood, e.g. through exposure to chronic stress in the family, bullying or other early traumatic experiences, the pain of this disconnection remains unhealed in the nervous system. Over time if the relational ruptures are not repaired, the nervous system has to adapt and find other ways of trying to meet the human need for emotional connection.
How this adaptation occurs can be different for each and every one of us as we go through our lives. For example, maybe we strive to be more attractive, hard-working, high achieving in order to be respected and “seen” by others. Maybe we try to please others because we are so afraid of being disliked and abadoned. Maybe we live our lives according to the values held by our families, culture and society so that we will always fit in. Whenever we become caught up with these behaviours, it’s because our nervous system is trying to find a way of belonging- it goes in to a survival response and we do whatever we can to try to be important to others. But internally we may be feeling anxious, overwhelmed and alone. And we find our own ways of managing those feelings, e.g. through eating or drinking too much, overexercising, overworking, or trying to distract ourselves by watching endless box sets or scrolling our phones.
How does developing compassion help?
When we are able to start to look at our experiences through the lens of our curiosity, our compassion for our pain, and the (early) conditions which created the pain, can start to grow. We can begin to learn that the fears and pain we hold represent the younger parts of us who were never seen and held as they needed to be. As Gabor Mate states “what we are afraid of is what we have already experienced.”
Understanding how our emotional responses make sense in the context of our individual lives is important. It is this wisdom that can support us in dropping our resistance to being in more distressing emotional states and instead start to relate to them with the compassion they have always needed. It is when we hold such resistance to our emotional experiences that the nervous system stays in a dysregulated state, and it is here where we find our greatest suffering.
Developing greater self-compassion allows us over time to meet the important developmental task that we have as adults, which is to be there for all of the parts of ourselves with our deepest empathy and care. Compassion towards our suffering (as opposed to avoidance of our pain) provides the internal context in which the nervous system can feel more confident to move out of a survival response and in to a state of safeness and connection. It is in this state where you can begin to let go of behaviours and self-judgements which may be at some point in your life felt necessary, but today no longer serve you in helpful ways.
It has been a privilege for me in my long career that hundreds of people have put their trust in me to support them in their journey towards greater self-compassion, and if you feel that this is one you would like to take, please do get in touch.
“When you realise that nothing is lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”
Lao Tzu